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Wednesday, April 24, 2013

This year, Spellbinders has begun to Explore Beyond, encouraging artists to break through their own personal artistic limits and go beyond their usual comfort zone. In the same way, I am encouraging my crew of mixed media artists to also explore beyond and see how products designed primarily for card makers and scrapbookers can become part of their tool chest and used in a way that make them unique and all their own. To this end, today I am showcasing a piece called 'Explore' that reflects the theme of exploration.

I started off with a 6.5 x 6.5 inch piece of hand painted paper that I grabbed from my stash. It was made on watercolor paper using gesso, acrylic paint and acrylic glazes. I mounted it to a piece of book board to make the piece more sturdy. The backside of the book board was painted and the edges were finished off with a gold leafing pen.

Next I decided to find a focal image that echoed the theme of exploring. I found a great image of a plane, which I cut out from a 12 x 12 inch piece of patterned paper from the Off the Wall Collection: Travel from 7 Gypsies.

I have a huge pile of metal hardware, both found and bought/altered and I scooped up a batch of rusty metal washers.

I then die cut circles, cogs and gears using multiple colors of card stock and patterned paper.

Finally I spent some time creating the page, moving the pieces around until I found a composition that I liked. I glued all the paper and hardware to my hand painted background and then added the word 'explore' with rub-on letters.

It's funny that you should talk about people thinking that scrapbooking supplies can't be used for art. Of course they can! I use scrapbook paper often in my collage work, rub-ons are a big part of one of my product lines as are rubber stamps and self adhesive 'jewels.' As so many artists know ANYTHING can be used in making art (even stuff we'd rather they didn't)--just read any art magazine like Art News and Art in America. The trick is to transform it into whatever you want it to be. I remember someone I knew dismissing scrapbook paper, saying "I never use preprinted paper for MY art." Well, fine that's your thing, but don't make fun of it wholesale.Art is whatever you make with whatever you want to use. There's a world of stuff out there to be used. Why not use it?